Thursday, 31 March 2016

I have been reading William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudolf Steiner and William Arkle recently, and one thing upon which they are all clear and in agreement is that all evaluation rests upon primary thinking - that is intuition, or the thinking of my true and essential self; thinking which has nothing behind or beneath it (and that is how we know it).

This comes before even spiritual and religious thinking, because it is what validates spiritual and religious thinking; and without the validation of primary thinking we are merely responding to external stimulation, compulsion or habit. In the end, everything must be tested and confirmed by primary thinking - this is a task of mortal life.

Why then do we doubt this? Because we have been confused, and have been sold an incoherent alternative. At various times people have been indoctrinated with the notion that some abstraction like religion, politics or science is or ought to be the bottom line - but this is simply nonsense as well as being alienating. How can such labile, diffuse, imprecise and undefined things be the bottom line for anything?

Since all finally rests on the base of intuition, then primary thinking can and should be used to validate all general and specific knowledge claims; life indeed becomes a succession of such evaluations - a building of certainties concerning purpose, meaning, relation, structures and processes and everything else.

Thus intuition is (or should be) how we choose our religion (a necessary choice), and then what is authoritative within that religion as such matters arise and become urgent. It is how we appropriate to ourselves all essential aspects of that religion, and deal with uncertainties, and also evaluate our own (always somewhat imprecise, incomplete and distorted) previous answers.

This ability to clear away superficial thinking and plumb our own depths, to commune with the divine in ourselves and outside ourselves (as seems to be the explanation for this validity - which itself may be validated by prior intuitions) -- this becomes an essential activity in life.

And how to achieve this becomes a vital project for each of us, as we seek the best method for our unique self, in our unique circumstances - e.g. prayer of some type or another, some kind of meditation, some kind of artistic practice, some kind of conversation or consultation... whatever it may be.

Wednesday, 30 March 2016

People ask this about God - why did he create us so weak, feeble, easily swayed, prone to wickedness and self-indulgence?

The question cannot be answered until we have an understanding of our metaphysics, our own basic assumptions about the structure and purpose of reality. Once we know that, the question can be answered.

From my assumptions, humans were not made or created to be weak but that is what each of us is intrinsically and necessarily. We start-out weak. We had a pre-mortal spirit existence before we chose to be born into mortal incarnate (embodied) life; and during this pre-mortal life some became stronger than others such that some are born stronger, others weaker.

Some people have more to learn. Presumably the weakest are among those who have the most to learn, and that is why they are here, and why they wanted to be here - if you are weak, you are among those who stand to benefit most from the experience of life (i.e. benefit most in terms of strength and goodness).

(Think of someone whose innate weakness was in terms of proneness to addiction, and who by great effort overcomes it by choice, through faith in God and Alcoholics Anonymous - what an amazing and spiritually-valuable amount that person has learned from the experience of mortal life.)

Mortal life is part of the process of experience and learning by which we may (if we choose well) become stronger persons (stronger in love, goodness, resolve etc - and stronger as individual and unique persons participating in relationships).

It is not possible for God to make mature and strong persons as a finished product, because an essential part of that maturity and strength is a consequence of living, choosing, experiencing.

Mortal life is a tough school, but it is a school for divinization; God´s love is tough love - because that is what most of us require, because we are weak.

So God did not make us deliberately to be weak, instead that was how we began - how God ´found us´; and this world and this mortal life is one of the ways in which we may become stronger, in preparation for the next stage of post-mortal resurrected life.

Tuesday, 29 March 2016

This is a fascinating interview from 1973 with Jacob ´Ascent of Man´ Bronowski, who was at the time and for many years afterwards a great hero of mine. I watched and rewatched Ascent of Man many times, read and re-read his books many times -- indeed in about 1997 I even contacted his daughter offering to write a proper biography (she rebuffed me and said there was already somebody on the job; although a biography still has not appeared).

Bronowski was a man with great qualities as is, I think, apparent here - also a man of rather significant limitations as is also apparent. But the interview itself is remarkable. This is prime Saturday evening TV with Britain´s best known ´chat show´host ever, and the pace and depth of the discussion is remarkable. Partly this was how things used to be, partly it was due to the way that Bronowski, by strength of character and natural authority, was able to impose his own agenda on mere ´entertainment´.

It can also be seen how the scope of public discourse has been shut-down since - in relation to the discussion of race and intelligence (and bearing in mind, as is obvious enough, that Bronowski was a man of the left - close to being a pacifist and a communist or communist sympathizer like the great scientists JD Bernal and JBS Haldane, both of whom he mentions).

What you get from this is some real Old Left philosophy, based on atheism and an ingrained radicalism such that history is seen as a prolonged conflict between progressive enlightened forces, and theocratic dogma. For instance Bronowski wrote an influential book about the poet William Blake, which paints him in highly political terms and essentially ignores Blake´s blatantly obvious and in-your-face incandescent, visionary, mystical, heretical Christianity´.

For whatever reason, in the discussion of artistic bohemianism and how it contrasts with his image as a scinetist, Bronowski doesn´t mention his time on Mallorca in the 1930s living as a young poet with Robert Graves and Laura Riding, and with a mistress Eirlys Roberts (who later founded The Consumer Association) -- a life of fairly extreme bohemianism by the standards of that time. A touch of the whitewash there, perhaps?

But most telling is the near-final remark on his idea of utopia. Bronowski amplifies his point that he deeply believes that people want to work rather than be idle but are thwarted by the lack of meaningful work - so his utopia is a world where everybody has a satisfying job which he or she is good-at. This absurdity is a view which I shared as a teenager (under the influence of people from Bronowski´s generation) but by the time I was twenty had had thoroughly purged out of me by a crushing avalanche of counter examples from personal experience.

I continued to hold modified versions of this view for quite a while longer but was forced to abandon it when I realized that I was actually talking about myself and a tiny minority of others who are creatively motivated - and in fact hardly anybody is self-motivated, even under ideal conditions. Nearly everybody would prefer not to work. At the very least, most people need a strong social ethos of work to ´want´to do it, nearly everyone does work for rewards or to avoid punishments; and not for intrinsic satisfactions.

But the idea that such would be any kind of utopia is quite extraordinary now! - yet in 1973 was not unusual (as evidenced by the round of applause from the audience) and indeed the ecology (EF Schumacher) and self-sufficiency (John Seymour) movements added a considerable boost to this idea from around the time of this interview and for several years (Andre Gorz was another proponent). I mean the idea that the main political imperative ought to be the provision of Good Work. I think the idea came from the early socialists, reformers, and builders of model communities - perhaps especially William Morris.

I think this view was possible because that generation had been brought-up religiously, so their aethism carried a strong residue of belief in transcendental goods such as beauty, virtue, and honesty - values which Bronowski mentions specifically. And indeed he did indeed adhere to them and defend them strongly; furthermore he developed an integrated philosophy of life based around transcendentals which he expressed powerfully in his books and The Ascent of Man.

The trouble was, the next generation of cradle atheists abandoned all transcendental goods, and became selfish, short-termist and expedient in their actions. They knew about the transcendentals - in theory they approved of them - but lacking any deity could see no reason why they should adhere to them when it was inconvenient or risky. Thus we get the current world of lying careerist bureaucrats and lying public relations pundits which has swallowed-up professional science and the arts (and everything else large scale) until almost nothing remains.

They (we) became unprincipled cowards and slackers - and why not?... When God is dead and was never alive, religion a manipulative lie or a pathetic delusion, and fanatical religiousness (in practice, specifically Christianity) is seen the primary source of all evil through history and continuing (as Bronowski, and his like, taught us most thoroughly).

Anyway - I recommend this interview as containing a great deal of good material, and also revealing the seeds of error and pride which have led to such a pathetic collapse of art, science, politics and all serious human endeavour - in a way which would certainly have appalled Bronowski; although he would most likely have misdiagnosed its cause.

Monday, 28 March 2016

I very nearly called this web site 'The Play of William Arkle', and then I felt that it would sound rather too casual for most people and even an insult to the endeavour that is brought to the resolving of the mysteries of life.

The reason that the word 'play' suggested itself is that the journey of understanding seems to lead from the level of human survival as a personality in this world, through to a spiritual view that takes survival of our spiritual self for granted and then on again into the appreciation of the all encompassing smile of our Divine Creator.

This Divine Smile says a very simple thing, which is that the everlasting nature of its Spirit can have only two options, either it remains in its Absolute condition of Blissful non-action or it can engage in action through the creation of play grounds. This means creating theatres of time, space and lots of things from a condition of no action or time or space or things.

Our Creator felt that the first choice of no action could becoming boring because there was no adventure, surprise or growth involved. The livingness of The Spirit felt itself to be in need of such adventure as an expression of joyful love and fun. So the second choice came about purely for the exercise of joy and love and fun.

The only word I could find to cover the activity of joy and love and fun was the word play, but unless it is approached in the right way the word does not carry the correct significance. And thus the whole of this web site is a journey into the understanding of The Creators view of the word play.

You will find that my own earlier understandings moved gradually into this way of talking about our reality. It seemed to become more and more light hearted while being able to sympathise with all the conditions of growth which can feel to be the conditions of fear and anxiety. Thus the big game of life at play has conditions within it which can descend to the very opposites of its initial intention.

These opposite conditions are the result of our Creator deciding to give us the Gift of being able to become real players in our own right at this adventure which is being undertaken. This is why the picture book was called The Great Gift and why the writings in it referred to God as being our friend in this one life endeavour. Later on this was changed to the expression God, The Player Friend'.

As for me, I have kept the name William Arkle. I like the name because it implies that my will is doing its best to be a small expression of the Ark of Life, The Heart of the Creator Friend. However my close associates now find me calling myself Billy The Kid.

The above short piece was written a few months before William Arkle died at the age of about 76. It is an extraordinarily luminous, joyous, and apparently naive piece of writing - life-affirming and without a trace of bitterness.

How many people who have lived to 76, in the twentieth century - serving in the 39-45 war - and who have worked as an obscure and almost unknown artist, philosopher, painter and a religious visionary and teacher - could write in such an uncompromising fashion at the end of their lives? I have read many biographies and autobiographies and I cannot think of any other example.

At the end of his life the commonplace word ´play´has - for Arkle - become charged with such a depth of meaning that it has become central; earlier the same thing happened for ´friend´ (becoming a friend of the creator as the ultimate goal not just of mortal life but the principle for the organization of the universe and all reality).

Arkle makes little concession to the prevalent pessimism and despair. He all but laughs in the face of horror and suffering.

Because too many people are operating from false selves - that are merely automatic processes built by our interactions. Only the true self is free.

The true self is free, and nothing else is free. It is unique, thus all free thought is unique - it is also a child of divinity so the true self is godlike and in relationship with deity and all other true selves among our siblings (men and women, also angels and demons).

If we are not thinking from our true selves, we are just responding robots - we are automatic and we are existentially isolated.

There is a chosen state of unfreedom that is the entombing of the true self within automatic responses, stimulations. Such a person is a true slave - such a person has enslaved himself to the environment. (True slavery is a mental choice - a physical slave may have complete freedom in thinking from his true self.)

Another state is to choose freedom but deny relation - to cut-off the divine relation with deity. This is a complete freedom without meaning - it is total isolation.

To accept unfreedom is either mental slavery or isolation.

(We are born free, but from our freedom choose unfreedom - this is usual, it happens sometime in childhood, adolescence, or as young adults. There is temptation, and mostly people choose to succumb. And they know it. They could escape - but pretend they cannot, that there is no escape -- or that there is nowhere to escape to...)

It is our task to live in freedom and in relation, live in thinking located in the true self. The enemies are confusion, hedonism, cowardice, dishonesty... pride. Freedom is a state of simplicity and clarity - unique and potentially universal. And there are no shortcuts to it, no standard methods, no single or safe path.

We must reach our unique freedom from our unique circumstances - this is a quest, an adventure, it is happening now.

Friday, 25 March 2016

Nobody can protest their ignorance of sin - because to say it is to mean the opposite. Yet modern people are continually using this excuse (often on behalf of others, but we know what they really mean)!

The main problem in modernity is related to the sexual revolution - that is where the assault has been focused. Sexual sins are not the most important sins of themselves - but in our civilization they are the most significant sins because they are taught as virtues.

There is a moral inversion evident in the sexual arena - and it has now become illegal, against employment rules, and a matter for social ostracism to argue in favour of Christian sexual ethics: to state that these ethics are true.

The profound spiritual sickness of modernity is evident in our passive, zombie-like acceptance of morally outrageous teachings and behaviours in the sexual domain - of lies, evasions, inversions and the rest of it - these are matters of daily, hourly, experience going up to the top level of all major organizations.

Clearly, those who teach and lead are most deeply at fault, but we are all born with a moral compass (what CS Lewis called The Tao) which is why all past societies had very similar moral intuitions - so when such matters are systematically violated (for the first time in human history) then we all know what is going-on, we don't need to be told; and our protestations of ignorance or innocence merely compound the morass, and add dishonesty to the account of our corruption.

We are not talking about subtle hair-splitting here! We are talking about the fact that we live in a society which first lost its moral compass, then reinstalled it with the North and South reversed.

The fact that we placidly stumble through daily life - numbed by distractions and distracted by intoxications - being kind here and there, and feeling compassionate about things the mass media tells us to feel compassionate about... well, all this is sleepwalking into oblivion.

But it is more like the intoxication of drug addiction than sleepwalking, because we are culpable for our state - we choose to live in this un-responsible way.

Instead of our life being theosis, towards divinity - trial and error, repentance and striving - life is an incremental degeneration which we have renamed progress. Well, it doesn't fool anyone - most importantly it does not fool ourselves - as can be seen by the objective evidence of demotivated nihilistic despair all around - the evident (although feebly-denied) self-hating, self-destroying, suicidal conviction which has gripped the whole developed world and which is being implemented, daily, by the elites - with barely a glimmer of protest, because - after all - what is worth saving?

True enough. That is not the problem - the problem is that those who make the world so meaningless and despair inducing that it is not worth saving, prevent (to the best of their power) Christians from doing anything about it - they focused their declining powers on enforcing their nihilism, and on hunting out and extirpating or else subverting and corrupting all residual Christianity, and nearly all that remains of virtue.

(Specifically, they use one or two virtues to destroy the others, by a kind of rotation - compassion to destroy justice; kindness to destroy faith etc. After all, it is the good in evil which allows evil to prosper. But in each cycle - each turn of the wheel - there is more evil, less good.)

The dopey complacency of modern man is hard to tolerate: 'Oh, we aren't really that bad - our intentions are good.' - This is a hopelessness which spells the end of hope; because intentions are not good - there are indeed no intentions at all in any sense of a goal to life. How could there be intentions when a Man's life is seen to be, taught to be, an accidental and meaningless blip terminated by oblivion?

Thursday, 24 March 2016

Anything which might seem like a communication from the divine, or evidence of the divine, is therefore a mistake. For sure. It is either wishful thinking which is the basis of religion, or a product of terror - which is also (somehow) the basis of religion, or because of ignorance of science and statistics, or because of manipulation of public opinion, or...

Well we know it can't be true; so if there are a lot of people who insist it is true then they must be evil lying manipulators, ignornant fools, or mentally ill. Probably mentally ill - because delusions.

So if Modern Man is sure that divine revelations are not true, then he cannot be convinced otherwise by any 'evidence' at all - no matter how much evidence or of what type: he will deny that it is evidence.

The big question is, where did Modern Man get the fixed conviction that there can be no divine revelations? - because there never could be any evidence for that - yet he is absolutely sure about it.

Depsite that most people in the world today, and everybody in history (and himelf when he was a child) believes otherwise... (i.e. that there can be divine revelations)

Why then does Modern Man believe with 100 percent confidence it is incomprehensible outrageous nonsense?

Wednesday, 23 March 2016

C.S Lewis in 'That Hideous Strength' comes close, in my view, to the heart of the matter in the Company's discussion on the rivalry between 'Logres' and 'Britain':

'It all began,' Dimble says, 'when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the sixth century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it.'

'Something we may call Britain,' he goes on, 'is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell; a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home
of Sidney - and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.'

In terms of our country at least, it's the current domination of 'Logres' by 'Britain' that's impeding the change in consciousness and metaphysical understanding that is so badly
needed. Is this state of affairs necessarily permanent? By no means.

You have written before about England's rocks and mountains and the stones of its great Cathedrals possessing a formidable latent power, and I think there's real truth in that.
It's worth remembering as well that the course of History is a very deep and mysterious thing. Who in late 1941, for instance, would have predicted that the all-conquering Nazi hegemon would be (literally) dust and ashes a mere three and a half years later? Similarly, no-one in the late-80s, as far as I can remember, apart from the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn, predicated the downfall of Soviet Communism. Things can change very quickly.

That's my
point. But there needs to be a catalyst. A spark. Something to fire the imagination. Something that connects with the mythopoeic vision and understanding we all have deep within us of the true pattern and relationship between the Divine and the human.
You have also written about the urgent need for a Christian revival.

My sense (and I could be very wrong of course) is that this won't come about without a revival and return of what we might call Sacred Monarchy. The three great European Regicides of the last four hundred years - Charles I (1649), Louis XVI (1793), and Nicholas II (1918), each represented huge
steps towards the current void our civilisation totters above today.

Some sort of restoration, I feel, whether on the practical or on the imaginative level, is absolutely essential, I feel, as a first collective step towards the reanimaton of a truly Christ-centred political and social body.
The Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight puts it brilliantly here: 'If we cannot resolve our conflicts, we must at least imagine a dimension in which they are, or might be, resolved; which perhaps means, in Christian terms, looking forward, or up, to the advent of Christ in glory.

Such then, is the symbolic function of the Crown, not only itself dramatic, but also signifying the resolution and purpose of the drama within and beyond which it exists.'

It would be a mistake, I think, to focus on things on a too-worldly level - be that on existing Royal Houses like the House of Windsor or on 'hidden bloodlines' and so forth. Monarchy is essentially a spiritual quality.

Lewis knew this well. I quote from memory: 'A man's attitude to monarchy reveals the extent to which his tap root to Eden remains.'

No-one showed this better, for example, than J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, a work which has had a deeper impact on the popular consciousness and sown more potential seeds than any number of sermons or political campaigns.

I think the proof of all this can be seen in the huge crowds (of all creeds and races, it should be noted) that turned out in Leicester last year in silence to watch the procession and reburial of King Richard III. There was something truly deep and meaningful there which was able to connect with people at the deepest level and cut through everything that divides and trivialises.

It illustrates that, faced with our current challenges, there is a 'third way' between aimless acquiescence in our own suicide and a repressive, equally godless dictatorship. The King sleeps in his cave still, as in the stories, but he will wake when the time comes around, in both the inner and the outer worlds. Of that I am sure.

I had one of those sudden recognitions the other day about how I had been wasting a lot of life over many years in trying to locate the source of problems - specifically the source of the mainstream of bad things the results of which we see everywhere but the source of which is so elusive. I have written many blog posts on this theme, and a couple of books.

But when something is so real yet so hard to pin down, the cause is likely to be spiritual rather than perceptual - its causes apparent to 'the imagination' (if at all) - the imagination being our organ of perception of the spiritual - rather than to the five senses.

*

It is not that we cannot know such matters - probably we can in principle know almost anything (over time, across a vast timescale, with properly directed effort) - it is rather than the causes, once known cannot be pointed-at - and people (me too) are driven to wild abstractions in order to try and express insights.

We don't know the source, but the problem itself is (more or less) that metaphysical assumption of materialism, of denial of God, of spiritual factors being unreal... of focusing on the perceptual world and the goings-on in it as if they were the only things that exist or that matter.

The civilization has turned away so decisively from the spiritual world that even among the people, groups, religions who make the most of not turning away; whatever they may say, we can see that they have turned away - and are actually in thrall to materialism, secularism, and the dominant ideology. This is one way of understanding why secular Leftism, political correctness, progressivism and their companions of statism and bureaucracy are so utterly dominant everywhere... in the New Age, the counter-culture, ultra-radicalism and nearly all people in nearly all religions (including Christianity).

This is a much deeper matter than people making the wrong political choices - this is a flaw deep in our own souls - this is something which poisons each of us right inside.

*

There is a world of meaning around us, we used to know this (as children, and in earlier eras) and a world of divine communications directed at us; and we are walled-off from it so completely that we are unaware of it and deny it in our lives even (perhaps especially) when we refer to it with our mouths - those few who become aware of it nearly always explain it away (delusions, hallucnations, imaginations, wishful thinkings or pathological dreads) and (by their behaviour and stance) trivialize it.

There is a selective blindness, deafness and general insensibility at work here. It goes further than ('mere') atheism - but poisons our ability to be religious in any way, or spiritual in any way - everything is reduced to lifestyle options and stimuli - including all spiritual discourse.

The extent to which this is the case is truly terrifying when glimpsed - there are vast and primary forces at work around us and in us, and yet we are (both as individuals and more so as cultures) almost entirely unaware of them; yet we perceive them, implicitly and in horribly distorted forms, in the tidal movements of our era.

*

Nobody has satisfactorily explained the insanity which emerged to general visibility in the later 1960s, apparently at a very specific time in between 1966 and 1968. Something happened, something good tried to get-out; and something went horribly wrong.

Everyone senses that there were some good and important impulses or insights buried in all that - but the outcome in terms of understanding and human behaviour has been appalling: people became dead-eyed sleepwalkers, zombies, cyborgs... cut-off from the primary currents of reality, and whose every effort to comprehend and transform and improve was poisoned at source by gross distortion of perspective based on gross insensibility.

All attempts to do something positive are poisoned at source - either by the mainstream distortion, or else by the distortion of denying the irreversible significance of these tidal forces of good which have emerged in such distorted ways.

We cannot, it seems, go back - because to go back requires denying the destiny of the underlying forces; but we (obviously!) cannot go forward in the ways that we are doing.

*

Well, where it came from is not really the point - because it is now everywhere - I can feel it swirling in myself as I write, as if like a toxic fog!

This goes beyond cyclical theories of civilization - this is not part of a cycle, it has not happened before.

It goes beyond a mere failure to do what ought to be done (of course we fail, people always fail) - it is something new, this kind of blindness to what should be done and also to the fact that we are not doing it, and also to the fact that we are not trying to do it, and also to the fact that our attempts to make matters better are actually making them much worse.

*

So what then? What am I asking myself to do instead - what should I be striving for?

Two things: perception and clarity.

I need to perceive reality, including all the important 'spiritual' things which are there and active but excluded from awareness. And secondly I need clarity about these spiritual things - what is needed is not something passive, vague, dreamy, partially-glimpsed - nor something abstract, detached, observed; but instead an active, purpsive, willed, clear headed and fully-conscious and heart-felt kind of perception.

This is not easy to do, it is not clear how to do it, it is not obvious how to maintain this psychological-&-spiritual state once achieved - but that is what is required. It is what we are supposed to do, destined to do - indeed, it is something we ought to have done some time ago (generations ago); and it was our complete failure to do it, which is the ultimate source of the all-pervading problem.

Tuesday, 22 March 2016

What is interesting is the idea of an economic system which is subordinated to Christianity, and in accordance with Christian principle - which is how things should be in a well-ordered society.

The other example of Christian economics, which I know much better, is Distributism in relation to Roman Catholicism - this was a system devised by Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton, made popular again in the 1970s by EF Schumacher (from whom I discovered it), and which still has its modern advocates - such as Joseph Pearce.

People often get confused by analysing these Christian economic systems using Right/ Left secular economic comparisons - which leave out the essential and primary religious superstructure.

But Christian and secular economics are as different as chalk and cheese, because the aim is different: Christian economics is ultimately aimed at assisting (or at least not harming) the salvation of the people, and all proximate economic aims should ideally be in harmony with this.

Mis/
Understanding Barfield as therapeutic: the role of Christianity in Owen
Barfield’s metaphysical system

Barfield explicitly stated that ‘Idolatry’ (or
‘literalism’) was the besetting sin of the modern era, and that the ‘one thing
needful’ was therefore a symbolic apprehension of life. Much less emphasized
and infrequently mentioned was Barfield’s (unorthodox) Christianity – which
provides a mostly implicit framework for his writings. This essay will suggest
that there are two levels of understanding Owen Barfield’s work – one with, and
the other without, this Christian framework. Barfield’s greatest impact so far
has probably been among non-Christians with an eclectic range of ‘Perennial
philosophy’ approaches to spirituality, Anthroposophists, and those with a
broadly ‘post-modernist’ attitude to objective reality such as post-Jungians.
These thinkers have been crucial in supporting Barfield’s work during his life,
maintaining his reputation since his death, and elucidating and clarifying
Barfield’s distinctive ideas. But in setting aside his Christianity, a degree
of misrepresentation is inevitable and the resulting understanding of
Barfield’s achievement ends-up as being broadly psychological, sociological and
‘therapeutic’. In other words, Barfield is seen as essentially providing a kind
of therapy, which has the potential to heal modern Man’s alienation. I will
argue that this interpretation is correct but incomplete; and that when
Barfield’s ideas are restored to their original Christian context he can be
seen as essentially a theologian rather than a healer.

Examining
the nature of evidence for Barfield’s Evolution of Consciousness

Barfield often stated that his core idea was the
evolution of consciousness, and also that he arrived at this idea as a
consequence of his study of the changing meaning of English words (as described
in his earliest books Poetic Diction and History in English Words); this
insight being later being confirmed by the work of Rudolf Steiner. In later
works, Barfield made further logical arguments to support a ‘developmental’
model of evolution, beginning with a generalized consciousness and only later
becoming focused into solid bodies and discrete selves. I will argue that in
his life’s work, Barfield was in reality working at the most fundamental
philosophical level of providing a new metaphysical basis for human life – and
that therefore the ‘evidence’ he provided in support of the evolution of
consciousness was not truly ‘evidence’ – because metaphysics is the framework
that controls the nature of evidence; therefore there cannot be any empirical
or observational evidence either to support or to refute a metaphysical system.
What Barfield was instead doing was to provide an historical personal account
of the development of his metaphysics, a variety of illustrations of the
consequences of his metaphysics, and an examination of the completeness and
coherence of his new metaphysics of evolution as contrasted with mainstream
Darwinian Natural Selection. This clarifies the metaphysical scope and nature
of both Darwin’s and Barfield’s evolutionary theories, and the comparison
between them is therefore primarily to be seen as a life choice, rather than
being a matter of evaluating the balance of evidence.

When I was an atheist, I thought of God as a God-of-the-gaps, and a philosopher's God - an explanatory hypothesis - and indeed a grossly over-explanatory hypothesis: a cop-out.

I got the idea tha Christians (and others) saw God as so totally powerful that he could do anything; therefore, anything you wanted explained at any time, you could just say 'God did it' - which was so generally applicable that it left you pretty much where you started-out.

I didn't understand the concept of revelation - that what is known about God is a product not just of reason, of philosophical argument - but mainly of God revealing himself to Men. But if I had grasped the importance of revelation, I would have dismissed it as purely subjective, because there are so many different claims about what God has revealed. I would have wondered why this all powerful God could not do a better job of communicating unambiguously and clearly with Men - or better still, why he had not built-in all the knowledge that Man needed, so communication by revelation was not required.

Also, although I knew that the Christian God was a God-of-Love, I didn't realize that this contrasted with other concepts of God - or that this business of Love actually placed constraints upon what God could or would do (and the reason for his doing it).

The problem was, perhaps, teleology - purpose and goal - what was the purpose of 'reality' and how did that purpose relate to Man? I had never heard that there was anything in Christianity about each Man becoming a (small g) god as his ultimate goal beyond death - I knew nothing about divinization, theosis, sanctification, spiritual progression (except in non-Christian sources which assumed that this was supposed to happen on earth, during mortal life).

My only understanding of what was supposed to be going on in the Christian scheme of things was that God made Man the way he is, then Man fell into original sin, and then God set things back the way they had started out - which seemed a pretty pointless exercise, overall.

If I had known about the theme of divinization or theosis (eg from Eastern Orthodoxy or Mormonism) I would probably have wondered why this all powerful God didn't just make things as he wanted them to be from the very beginning - why bother with a process of incremental progress? And why would this totally powerful and autonomous 'omni' God bother with creating Men - what could he possibly gain from the exercise - given that he had everything and needed nothing?

Therefore, for me personally, the constraints of a limited God - the idea of God conceptualized in very concrete and personal terms as an actual being - spatio-temporally bounded - with a body, parts and passions God wrestling with the stuff of reality to create order, Goodness and raise Men to gods - a limited God who starts with chaos and must create step-by-step what he aims for - a God whose nature of Love also sets limits on what he can do... all these limitations and constraints are vital to me making sense of God, and of Christianity generally: including the need for Jesus Christ.

And this God is not a God of the philosophers, not a God created to explain - he is a God who is a person above all; a person who must become known by ourselves as Men who - as potential and partial gods ourselves, but true embryonic gods - are also very constrained and also liberated (for ill and good) by our own natures. The key concept is God as heavenly Father - with (in an ideal and complete way) relates to us a Father to beloved children; and I see no limt to this understanding - God as loving Father is not just a metaphor to be dropped at some point in the analysis by sophisticated thinkers, but an understanding which goes all the way through.

Strangely, it s the constraints on God which enable me to recognize him as true; whereas the abstract God described as being everywhere all the time and outside of time, the God of infinite power and knowledge... well, such a God makes no deep sense to me: not just because the concepts are beyond human comprehension, but mainly because he is such a total explanation for everything, that in practice he explains nothing.

Sunday, 20 March 2016

The reason why nothing seems to make a difference to the overall wrongness of 'things' is that the system we inhabit is buffered against change - We need new wine and a new bottle: both - if the wine is new but the bottle is old, the wine will be imbued with toxin; if the bottle is new and the wine is old we still drink the same poison.

The wine is consciousness - the mode of thinking; the bottle is metaphysics - the system of thought. Both need replacing.

If we try to attained higher, fuller consciousness with without a Christian metaphysics - as do the New Age, Perennial philosophers - we become just spiritualized, political, 'healing-orientated' mainstream Leftists. And if we try to be Christians without a new consciousness - like some evangelicals who achieve numerically impressive conversions - then we will express all the right beliefs but they will make no difference to the texture of our daily living we will be normal alienated, stultified 21st century bureaucrats.

To speak with harsh honesty, when it comes to the deep malaise of our time and our persons: Either wine alone or bottle alone is useless.

The fact that we need to change both is why our civilization is winding-down and indeed actively destroying itself - and nothing seems to make a difference. The best spiritual teachers of modern times recognize this (I am thinking, from my personal pantheon, of Steiner, Barfield, Arkle and - currently - Naydler) they recognize that we need to be Christians and we also need to be mystics: we need both.

We need to be mystics in the sense that we cannot be 'normal' in our thought processes - we cannot think 'like other people'. Many Christians are resistant to this fact; but it is a fact nonetheless. If we are to live by the spirit in a spirit-denying and spirit-mocking world, Christians are necessarily going to appear weird, are going to think strangely and incomprehensibly to the mainstream masses.

Our evidences, the perspective on things, cannot be mundane - we must (and I mean must) be open to the imagination and to non-perceptual communications - open, that is, to those matters which are directly-communicated to our inmost spirits. .

But also we must be Christian - our metaphysics must be Christ-centred; in this respect theological heresy seems to matter little or nothing* - it is the presence of Christ uniquely at the focus of life and the world which matters, not how we make detailed theological explanations of the nature and operations of Christ.

The necessity of Christianity is true for reasons given by revelation and indeed philosophy - but the evidence is easily seen in the ineffectuality or counter-productiveness - the chaotic and prideful lives of a multitude of non-Christian (or pseudo-Christian) spiritual thinkers. These are resistant to the necessity of Christianity and have 1001 reasons why they cannot allow such 'exclusive' claims - ultimately these reasons are secular, materialist, and anti-intuitive; they are excuses by which people cling to 'respectability' in the secular Left establishment.

But reality is exclusive. Christianity is true - so saying it isn't uniquely valid is unreal, untruthful, mistaken. A life based on such a gross error as the failure to recognize the centrality of that which just is central will be flawed deeply and fatally.

This is why being effective as a full Christian in the modern world is so difficult - we have born-into a false, nonsensical self-refuting metaphysics of anti-Christian materialist relativity which undercuts and renders pointless, meaningless and purposeless all the good things in our experience; and we (also) inhabit a profoundly alienated thought world - where we are trained-into a nihilist isolation and exile of our deepest selves - so life is unreal, people are unreal, and the situation is so unbearable that life is spent trying not to think about life (escaping into distraction, insensibility and intoxication).

The way out is therefore difficult - because we must simultaneously have new wine and new bottles- there can be no gentle and incremental process of piecemeal replacement - at any rate we must transform both together or neither will lead to the change we so much need and wish for.

We must have a different consciousness and we must understand ourselves in the world differently at the same time and in a mutually reinforcing way. Both. Together.

Difficult - but at least we know what we must do. And know that doing just the one or the other is - sooner or later and usually very quickly - a waste of time and effort: a dead-end.

* Note on heresy. Christians may be alarmed by my apparently casual attitude towards heresy; but, negatively, a focus on the necessity of the 'correct' set of beliefs about Christ has been massively counter-productive in the history of Christianity (causing schism, hatred, and with each side excluding innumerable exceptionally good and valid Christians from their definitions); while positively, if Christ is the centre of a belief system - and Christ is minimally understood as the Jesus of the Gospels who is son of the loving creator god - then this will surely suffice to exclude the bad-and-non-Christian heresies.

Saturday, 19 March 2016

It is noticeable that modern spirituality, especially New Age themed practices - including Western versions of Eastern religions, almost always focus on 'healing' and the practice of therapy.

This is also, substantially, the case for many types of self-identified Christianity - that the main focus is healing, and Christian practice is seen as a form of healing.

Government, too, is seen as a kind of healing - it puts itself forward as a mass-healing process ('the therapuetic state').

It seems everyone, all the time, is talking about healing. Of course they seldom achieve it and typically do the reverse - but healing is the prime justification for... everything.

*

What this means is that spiritual life, religious life, ends-up being about human psychology - and more exactly about human psychology as it is now.

There is no doubt that the human psyche needs healing - that people are alienated, and their very selves feel cut-off from the world (that is when people are not simply lacking in consciousness and self-awareness, in sleep, intoxicated, or just distracted e.g. by the mass media and social interactions).

This lapsing of religion and spirituality into therapy is pervasive. And it is inevitable - so long as there is no external divine locus towards which we are orientated.

Therefore, religions or spiritualities which emphasize, almost-exclusively, the 'immanence' or indwelling of the divine (God in us, God in the world, in nature...), also become (before long) just another kind of therapy.

It is only when the divine is located elsewhere and when we are personally orientated towards the divine (and, preferably, on a path to the divine) that we can avoid having therapy as the main thing in life.

*

Because: therapy for what? We want to be healthy, happy, energetic - for what? What are we supposed to do if or when we are fortunate enough to be in this state?

Plus of course, life always end in death (usually preceded by some sickness and pain) - so if therapy is the focus of life, success is very temporary, and then life is always and for everyone an inevitable failure.

So why bother? hence the modern fascination with and esire for suicide (euthanasia, chosen reproductive sterility, anti-natalism, national self-annihiliation, fetchization of 'the other' etc.)

Then I think we can see that this situation we are in, this situation in which therapy (healing the body, healing the mind) is exactly the situation that Steiner described as the working of angels during 'sleep' - in 'Steinerese' this refers to the body becoming primary and consciousness being ruled out of consideration.

This is exactly the seismic change in Western society since the 1960s with the take-over of the sexual revolution and identity politics (it began earlier, but became mainstream in the 60s).

It has, of course, been staggeringly un-successful in terms of its objective of healing! But that was also to be anticipated, since there is no foresight, no order, no prudence, no consciousness about the Leftist revolution including the sexual revolution - which is now the mainstream, official, mass media driven and state enforced ideology.

*

That is the point that Steiner was making. When The West turned away from religion in favour of 'therapy' - of sexual and individual license ('freedom'), short-term happiness and avoidance of suffering - it also sabotaged the attainment of those goals which are not true goals, and cannot function as goals - but are actually means to the external end which is divinization - becoming more like God, who is 'other', another personage - as well as permeating the world

So - we should not neglect the necessity for evolution of consciousness, in Man and in ourselves - the need for theois, for maturation towards becoming adults in faith; but consciousness, therapy, healing only make sense and can only be achieved in the ultimate framework of the external divine.

Striving fof higher consciousness in the absence of religion is just another kind of lethal. (Just look at the people who try it!)

God is the First Thing; and absolutely essential - not an 'option' but a necessity.

Friday, 18 March 2016

Charlton, BG. Reconceptualizing the metaphysical basis of biology: a new definition based on deistic teleology and an hierarchy of organizing entities(2016) The Winnower. DOI: 10.15200/winn.145830.07350

This is the final, archived, version of my 10,000 word paper on the nature of biology. (It has several significant differences from the draft version I published a few weeks ago.)

For ease of reading, I suggest downloading and printing the PDF file version of the journal article:

Reconceptualizing the
metaphysical basis of biology: a new definition based on deistic teleology and
an hierarchy of organizing entities

Bruce G Charlton

School of
Psychology, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, England

Abstract

Modern biology was
initially established by Darwin’s Origin
of Species in 1859 and fully implemented by the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of
natural selection with genetics that solidified in the middle twentieth century.
I will argue that this ‘paradigm’ is based upon fundamental metaphysical
assumptions that render formally-insoluble some of the most important
theoretical problems of biology. These problems include the origin of life, the
major transitions of evolution, the origins of sexual reproduction and of
species, and the basic mechanism behind ‘group selection’. The fundamental
deficit of the current metaphysics of biology is that it lacks a unified and
coordinated teleology (direction, purpose, goals). I advocate a new teleological
and metaphysical basis for biology that is minimally based on a ‘deist’
conception of reality: i.e. that everything is governed by a unified principle
of purpose, order and meaning. Such a teleology suggests a definition of
biology around the concept of development – that is the growth, differentiation,
coordination and interactions of entities; unfolding through time through the lifespan
and across generations. The local and specific implementation of teleology is
suggested to be accomplished by a hierarchy of cognitive organizing entities that are located outwith biological systems.
These putative organizing entities work on biological entities primarily
through building-in purposiveness during development. A deistic system directed
by organizing entities is, of course, not a 'biological' theory; but then,
neither is natural selection a biological theory: both are metaphysical
frameworks for the science of biology.

Fundamental
unsolved problems of biology

From more than two
decades of theoretical consideration of biology, especially evolutionary
biology, I have concluded that there are no satisfactory answers to some of the
most important and most fundamental questions of biology. I will argue that the
fundamental reason for this is the lack of any teleology (purpose) in natural
selection, which is the current dominant biological paradigm. Therefore, I
propose a new teleological metaphysics for biology.

Biology (including
medical research and psychology) has, since the 1950s, become the most ‘successful’
– that is, by far the largest and most heavily-funded and most status-rewarded
of the sciences (Charlton & Andras, 2005). However, it is striking that
this progress has been at the proximate level of mechanisms and technologies,
and not at the level of fundamental understanding.

Indeed, the
triumph of biology was preceded and accompanied by a major act of redefinition
of the subject itself. A little book called What
is Life? by the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1944) served as a
catalyst for this change, and was accompanied by an influx of physicists and
chemists into biology, leading to the triumphant discovery of the structure of
DNA and of the coding and transcription mechanisms by which genes make proteins
(Judson, 1979).

But in paving the
way for these discoveries, the definition of biology was implicitly changed
from ‘The science of living things’ to ‘The science of things that reproduce
and are subject to natural selection’. This move away from the livingness of
biology was what allowed non-biologists to take-over the subject at the very
highest level; and since then biology has been dominated by researchers who use
physics, chemistry, engineering (i.e. big, expensive machines of various
types), computers, statistics, economic theory and a range of other
non-biological perspectives and technologies.

As I say, the
triumphs are well known – but the major unsolved problems of biology from 1950
remain unsolved; however, mainstream attention has simply shifted elsewhere and
there is currently perhaps less interest in these matters than at any time
since before biology became a separate science.

Such lack of
interest – and of knowledge – has meant that most people are not even aware,
have not even noticed, that these problems are unsolved. Because, so long as an
‘answer’ to such problems is good enough to survive a couple of minutes
semi-attentive and unfocused consideration by a narrowly-trained micro-specialist
who is not really a biologist, and is adequate to support and sustain a program
of publication and grant-getting (which are regarded as sole and the necessary
requirements of modern science), then this is regarded by modern biological
researchers as sufficient proof of that answer’s validity (Charlton, 2012).

But the problems
remain – and they are so fundamental as to cast doubt on the whole basis of the
‘paradigm’ that defines, controls and validates modern biology (Kuhn -1970 - popularized
the idea of a paradigm governing science – but at bottom, ‘paradigm’ is just a
new, and confusion-generating, name for metaphysical assumptions).

Origins
of life

An example is the
question: What is life? – which is the title of that influential book by
Schroedinger (1944). The current answer is, implicitly: that is ‘life’ which
reproduces or replicates and is subject to natural selection.

But this answer
includes viruses, phages and prions – which hardly seem to be ‘alive’ in that
they lack a dynamic metabolism; and also some forms of crystal – which are
usually regarded as certainly not-alive (Cairns-Smith, 1990). Furthermore, some
economic theories and computational programmes explicitly use the mechanisms of
natural selection - and these are not regarded as part of biology.

Strikingly, there
has been no success in the attempts over sixty-plus years to create life in the
laboratory under plausible ancestral earth conditions – not even the complex
bio-molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. It has, indeed, been well-argued
that this is impossible; and that ‘living life’ must therefore have evolved
from an intermediate stage (or stages) of non-living but evolvable molecules
such as crystals – perhaps clays (Cairns-Smith, 1987). But nobody has succeeded
in doing that in the lab either, despite that artificial selection can be
orders of magnitude faster than natural selection.

Since there is no acknowledged
boundary dividing biology and not-biology, then it would seem that biology as
currently understood has zero validity as a subject. What are the implications
of our failure to divide the living from the non-living world: the failure to
draw a line around the subject? Well, since there is no coherent boundary, then
common sense leads us to infer in that case either
everything is not-alive or everything is-alive. If nothing is-alive, not even
ourselves, there seems to be no coherent possibility of us knowing that we ourselves are not-alive, or indeed of anything
knowing anything – which, I take it, means we should reject that possibility as
a reductio ad absurdum.

Alternatively, the
implication is that if anything is-alive,
then everything is-alive, including
the mineral world – so we dwell in a wholly animated universe, all that there
is being alive but – presumably – alive in very different degrees and with
different qualities of life. This inference I intend to regard as valid: it
will be my working metaphysical assumption, and is one to which we will return
later.

So; if life is to be
regarded as universal, it seems that the presence of ‘life’ can no longer be
used as definitive of biology; and since reproduction/ replication is also
inadequate, then we need a new basis or principle around-which may be made a
different definition of the subject ‘biology’. I will argue, below, why this new
principle should be ‘development’.

Sexual
reproduction and the major transitions of life

What of sexual
reproduction? How did such a massively inefficient reproductive mechanism arise
in the face of its immediate short-term damage to reproductive success? The
great evolutionary theorist William D Hamilton recognized sexual reproduction
as a major unsolved problem, and worked on it for decades (2001) – but neither
this recognition, nor his attempted solutions in terms of ways to combat
parasites and pathogens, has attracted much interest or acceptance.

And indeed, even
if he was correct, Hamilton did not really solve the problem of how sexual
reproduction arose – but only
clarified its advantages (mainly in terms of resistance to infection) once
sexual reproduction had already arisen, and already become established. The
mechanism of how natural selection managed to cross the formidable
short-to-medium-term barrier of vastly reduced reproductive success (caused by
the need to find a suitable member of the opposite sex with whom to reproduce,
and the approximate halving of potential reproductive units) remains utterly
unclear.

The same problem of
short-term disadvantage tending to undermine long-term advantage also applies
to the ‘Major Transitions’ of evolutionary history – which include sexual
reproduction but also the evolution of the simple (prokaryotic) cell, the
complex (eukaryotic) cell, multicellular organisms, and social organisms (Maynard
Smith & Szathmary, 1997). Each of these transitions requires overcoming the
fact that natural selection operates much more powerfully and directly upon the
lower, simpler and smaller levels of organization that replicate more rapidly;
so that there is a constant pressure and tendency for these lower levels to
become parasitic upon higher levels (Charlton, 1996).

In sum; natural
selection is much more rapidly and powerfully dis-integrative than integrative.
Yet, nonetheless, these transitions did actually occur in evolutionary history.
For example, in a multi-cellular organism, the dividing component cells are
constantly being naturally-selected for neoplastic (e.g. cancerous) change –
such that they cease to cooperate with and contribute to the organism, and
instead exploit it as a ‘host’ environment (Charlton, 1996a). How, then, did
multicellular organisms evolve the many integrative systems (e.g. nervous,
paracrine, hormonal and immune systems) designed to impose cooperation of
specialized cells and suppress non-functional and actively parasitic (e.g.
mutated) cell variants; bearing in mind that all such integrative systems are
themselves intrinsically subject to neoplastic evolution (as well as loss of
function from cumulative damage)?

The same phenomenon
and problem must (according to the theory of natural selection) apply to the
genetic organelles of the complex cell (such as chloroplasts and mitochondria;
Charlton et al, 1998); and also to the individual organisms in a social
organization (such as human society). Yet eukaryotic cells actually did arise –
despite their innate and intractable tendency to self-destruct; and there are
numerous highly evolutionarily-successful social animals among (for instance)
insects, birds and mammals. Indeed, it has been calculated that ants and humans
are the two groups with the greatest biomass among animals on earth, with ants
dominating the tropics and humans the temperate zones – termites are also highly
numerous in the tropics (Ridley, 1996).

The general problem
is therefore that the net effect of natural selection is to break down the
major transitions of evolution before they can be established – unless (as I
will argue later) this tendency is overcome by some as-yet-unknown purposive
(and indeed cognitive) long-termist, integrating and complexity-increasing
tendency.

The
nature of species

Darwin’s first
great evolution book was termed On the
Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection… (1859); and that is a clue
to the next unsolved problem – which is: ‘what is a species?’

Darwin was trying
to explain how ‘species’ (in a very general sense of the major, as well as
minor, sub-divisions of living things) originated. To do this he already had to
assume that he knew, more or less, what species were.

In other words,
natural selection was proposed as a historical mechanism (in practice the only
mechanism) which led to modern species. In yet other words; natural selection
was supposed to explain species – and species was the thing that was explained
(Panchen, 1993). Unsurprisingly, therefore, there has never been a principled
explanation that was based on natural selection of what species actually are
and how they are divided (Hull, 1988). At root, my understanding is that impasse happens because species are
being used both as that which explains, and as that which is explained – which
is circular reasoning.

And, in practice
as well as in theory, all possible suggestions for such a definition are
refuted by data. For example, the idea that species cannot interbreed to yield
fertile offspring is untrue with numerous exceptions - some natural and some
artificially generated. And the systems of differentiating and classifying
species on the grounds of ‘homologous’ anatomy, physiology and genetics do not map-onto
the classification of species in terms of their inferred lineage (e.g.
cladistics) – and the identification of homology has itself (like species)
never been objectively defined (Horder, 1993).

Furthermore, there
is no more evidence now than there was in 1859 that natural selection is
capable of being the sole and sufficient ‘explanation’ for the diversity of
life upon earth. I put ‘explanation’ in quotation marks, because it is
debateable whether natural selection – being based upon contingent and variable
selection acting upon undirected (a.k.a.‘random’) variation (Hull, 2001) - is
actually a real explanation; because then the ultimate explanation is
apparently that there is no explanation. Natural selection does not say ‘why’,
but instead ‘how’ evolution occurs. The nature of change is contingent upon
undirected events shaped by contingent processes, and therefore is essentially
non-predictable in its specifics. In some senses, therefore, natural selection
does not genuinely ‘explain’.

In effect, with
natural selection, at most one can
only say: Many things might have happened for many reasons, but as an
historical fact ‘this’ is what actually happened.

Certainly natural
selection can coherently describe the historical situations leading to
relatively small differences between organisms – perhaps up to the level of
creating new and related species. This was already known to Darwin and was
indeed the basis of his evidential argument – e.g. he described the nature and
scale of effects of artificial selection done by animal breeders, plus some
effects on the shape and size of beaks among Galapagos finches. To this, modern
biologists could add observations on the modification of microorganisms under
laboratory conditions, for instance the evolution of bacterial resistance to
antibiotics. And there are also human racial differences of skeleton, teeth,
skin and hair, brains and behaviours and many others – probably amounting to
sub-species levels of differentiation – again these were (approximately) noted
by Darwin (for instance in the mention of ‘favoured races’ in the subtitle of
his 1859 book).

But all these are
quantitative, not qualitative, changes; changes in magnitude but not in form.
Neither natural selection, nor indeed artificial selection done by Man, has
been observed creating a new genus, nor any taxonomic rank more fundamental
such as a new family or phylum. There is no observational or experimental
evidence which has emerged since 1859 of natural selection leading to major,
qualitative changes in form – nor the originating of a novel form. Nobody has,
by selection, changed a cat into a dog, let alone a sea anemone into a mouse
(or the opposite); nobody has bred a dinosaur from a bird, nor retraced, by
selective breeding, a modern species to its assumed ancestral form. There have,
at most, been attempts to explain why such things are impossible in practice –
why, for instance, the linear sequence of evolution cannot be ‘rewound’.

The
problem of group selection

The final example
concerns group selection. My impression is that the most thoughtful and
perceptive evolutionary theorists intuitively recognized that group selection
was an anomalous residue in the post-teleological paradigm of Neo-Darwinism;
because true group selection (when properly understood) entails a purposive
cognitive mechanism that can predict, can ‘look ahead’ several generations, and
infer what is likely to be good for the survival and reproduction of the
species (i.e. future descendants) rather than for the specific individual
organism under here-and-now selection – and can therefore impose this long-term
groupish direction to evolutionary change, in the face of evolution that
benefits the individual in the short-term (Hamilton, 1998).

Whether or not it
is due to the built-in ‘spooky-spiritual’ aspects of group selection, there has
been and is a powerful and almost moralistic desire within biology utterly to
purge group selection from Neo-Darwinian theory (Dawkins, 1976). However, it should be noted that Hamilton himself did not reject the significance of group
selection; on the contrary, he continued to believe it was real throughout his
later career as is apparent from his essays and commentaries in the Narrow Roads of Gene Land collections
(1998, 2002). However, so far as I know, he did not suggest a distinctive
mechanism for group selection.

Group selection is
most often discussed in relation to ‘altruism’. Altruism is behaving such as to
increase the reproductive success of others at the expense of one’s own
reproductive success (for example, sacrificing a young and potentially fertile
life for the benefit of the group – perhaps in defence against a predator). Altruism
indeed calls-out for explanation, since it is very frequently, almost
universally, observed – e.g. multicellular animals depend on it for continued
existence, social animals depend upon it for the continuation of sociality. But
the proposed solutions – inclusive fitness/ kin selection and various types of
reciprocal benefit (Ridley, 1996) – do not explain the origin of altruism, but instead explain why altruism – once
established, may be advantageous to sustain.

The problems are at
root the same as the previous examples – favouring the long term over the short
term: in this instance imposing cohesion and cooperation that benefits the
whole against the tendency of natural selection to favour the part at the
expense of the whole. For example, preventing the amplification of selfish,
short-termist, parasitic variants and lineages (which are immediately
advantageous, and much more strongly selected-for), so as to pursue the
long-term cohesion, survival and reproduction of the group. Lacking such a
mechanism or tendency, any groupishness and long-termism would continually be undermined,
and would tend rapidly to be undone by the strong selection pressure for
individuals to exploit and parasitize the group (Maynard Smith & Szathmary,
1997).

Hence, despite
half a century of exclusively selfish gene theorizing in mainstream
evolutionary biology; the apparent need for some kind of longer-termist and
group-favouring process remains.

The
necessity for teleology in the metaphysics of biology

Natural selection is an inadequate metaphysical basis
for biology because it lacks teleology - a goal, direction or purpose.

This lack of
teleology means that the potential for meaning - for knowledge - is excluded
from the system of biology, and from any other system which depends upon it.

Thus natural
selection is radically too small a metaphysical frame - it leaves out so much
that is so important, that what remains is not even a coherent subject. This is
revealed in the un-definability of biology and the incapability of biology to
understand the meaning of life and its origins, major transitions and
categories. Without teleology, biology is self-destroying.

Indeed - without
teleology we cannot know. I mean we
cannot explain how humans could have valid knowledge about anything. No knowledge of any kind is possible. If Natural
Selection is regarded as the bottom-line explanation - the fundamental
metaphysical reality (as it is for biology, and often is with respect to the
human condition) then this has radically nihilistic consequences. And this is a
paradox – if natural selection was the only
mechanism by which consciousness and intelligence arose then we could have no
confidence that the human discovery of natural selection was anything more than
a (currently, but contingently) fitness-enhancing delusion.

The reason is that
natural selection is at best – and when
correctly applied - merely descriptive of what-happened-to-happen. Since
tThere was no reason why things had-to-be
as they actually were, and there is no reason why the present
situation should stay the same, then there will be no reason to suppose that
the future outcome is predictable. There is no greater validity to
what-happened-to-happen compared with an infinite number of possible other things
that might have happened - so there is no reason to defer to
what-happened-to-happen, no reason why what-happened-to-happen is good, true,
just, powerful or anything else - what-happened-to-happen is just what led to
greater differential reproductive success for some length of time under
historical (and contingent) circumstances. Nothing more.

Therefore - if
humans are nothing more nor other than
naturally-selected organisms - then there is zero validity to: cognition, emotions,
intelligence, intuitions, morality, art, or science - including that there is
no validity to the theory of evolution by natural selection. None of the above
have any validity - because they all are merely products of what-happened-to-happen
(and are open-endedly liable to further change).

In sum - Without
teleology, there can be no possibility of knowledge.

(This is not some
kind of a clever paradox - it is an unavoidable rational conclusion.)

If, and only if,
biology includes direction and purpose, is the subject compatible with the
reality of knowledge. A new and better metaphysics of biology must therefore
include teleology.

A
deistic and teleological metaphysics

Metaphysics is the
branch of philosophy concerned with basic assumptions – descriptive of the
fundamental nature of reality. Science takes place within metaphysics, and therefore the results of science (any
possible results of science) can neither prove nor refute any metaphysical
description – although some metaphysical systems will more clearly and simply
make sense of (or ‘explain’) science than others.

For example, the ‘evidence’
that these fundamental problems are unsolved amounts only to the fact that they
are as yet unsolved – failure to
explain can never ‘prove’ that an explanation is impossible. Only that nobody
has yet come up with a satisfactory
explanation. Therefore, the ‘proof’ that these biological problems are
insoluble is not any empirical finding but philosophical reasoning.

In this sense
metaphysics (which is to say a ‘paradigm’) is not ‘testable’ by science. This
is because metaphysics itself underpins the definition of science (or a
specific science such as biology); metaphysics determines what counts as a
test, what observations to make and also how to interpret observations. For
instance, no amount of biological research can ever decide whether biology is
1. the science of alive things or 2. the science of replicating things. This is
not possible since definition 1 leads to one kind of biology using one type of
expertise and methods; but definition 2 to another kind of biology with very
different personnel and methods, as we have seen emerge over the past 70 years.

I therefore
suggest that a new paradigm – or, more strictly, a new metaphysical basis or
frame - for biology is required to address these and other fundamental defects
and deficiencies in modern biology; and to place biology honestly, accurately
and fruitfully in context of the total field of human discourse in general. In
a nutshell, I will be arguing that the overall shape of evolution across
history is best explained as a directional process of development – somewhat like
the metamorphic unfolding of a fertilized egg via an embryo towards sexually
mature adult and parenthood. Processes of selection occur within this teleological
development – but are subordinated to the overall goal and contributory,
coordinated sub-goals.

Furthermore, I
will suggest that a teleology of biology having the required properties entails
‘deism’; deism being belief in a single, overall, unifying - but potentially
abstract and impersonal - source of order and meaning for reality.

Deism here refers to the
assumption of some kind of deity; but theism refers more specifically to the
reality of gods or God.It is necessary,
therefore, to distinguish between on the one hand the general idea of deism,
which I regard as essential for a coherent and viable definition of biology;
and on the other hand the idea of theism, with theism being a particular sub-category
of deism, and more specific than is required for the practice of biology.

Deism and theism may seem
superficially to be identical-in practice; and perhaps both equally absurd! –
at least to the usual atheistic professional biologist; but the distinction is
both significant and important. I personally believe in the reality of the
Christian God; but such a specific belief is not necessary for there to be a useful and potentially fruitful
teleology of biology, as is demonstrated by the many historical examples of
non-Christian biologists. (However, as a generalization, the long-term success
of science as a social system, in particular its adherence to the principle and
habit of truthfulness, may depend rather more specifically upon scientists
having been - at least - raised in a
Christian or Jewish milieu, with
their somewhat distinctive doctrinal emphasis on honesty; Charlton, 2012.)

So, the adoption of deism
as an assumption could be seen as constituting a cost entailed by providing a coherent teleology of biology; a cost
which explains the sustained resistance to such a thing and which may explain
why teleology has been for so long and so stubbornly resisted within
professional biology. Because teleology at the price of deism is a cost that
most modern biologists would utterly refuse to pay; since they are, as a strong
generalization, the most materialistic and positivistic and anti-spiritual,
militantly un-religious people the world has yet known! (Indeed, I know of only
two practicing Christians among evolutionary biologists - one of them being
myself; and that only for the past seven years.)

It is no coincidence that
so many of the best known and most effective public dissenters from
Christianity and promoters of atheism since Darwin have been recruited from a
tiny minority of eminent evolutionary theorists – past examples include
Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, the early agnostic TH Huxley; and his grandson, the
humanist and an architect of the Modern Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, Julian Huxley;
current examples include the campaigning anti-religion activists Richard
Dawkins and Daniel C Dennett.

But militant
atheism is not merely a product of being a scientist: biologists are typically much
less spiritual than mathematicians and physicists, who often espouse deistic
ideas. As examples; Einstein saw reality in this ‘deist’ way with an abstract,
impersonal, but unifying ‘God’; Roger Penrose has stated he is a Platonist; the
theoretical physicist Paul Davies won the Templeton Prize for his many writings
from a deistic perspective; and Freeman Dyson, also a Templeton Prizeman, is a
Christian, as was Kurt Gödel.

In sum – even if I
can show that deism is what biology most needs, and even though there is
nothing ‘unscientific’ about such an assertion, deism seems very unlikely to be
welcomed or accepted by the mass of currently active and dominant professional
biologists.

Why
deism specifically?

So, I will assume
that deism is the necessary intellectual ‘cost’ that must be paid to restore
purpose and cohesion to biology; it is minimally-necessary to restore ‘a
spiritual dimension’ to biology; not indeed within
biology – but as the framing
metaphysic of biology. That is, the spiritual dimension is located outside of
biology to give it shape and bounds, meaning, and direction. Biologists needs
not adopt deism as a ‘religion’; but they must at least accept it as a
working-hypothesis.

But the concept of
deism is unfamiliar, as is its distinction from theism. I should therefore
clarify that although this deistic perspective of the primacy of consciousness,
purpose and ubiquitous life is indeed spiritual, it is not necessarily
religious in the sense of associated with belief in any actual religion. A
deist regarding ultimate reality as having the cognitive property of purpose
does not need to take the further step of a belief in ‘theism’, theism being
the belief in a specific God or gods.

The deism that is
entailed by a belief in teleology includes
many possible forms of theism, including belief in a ‘god’ who originally
created everything (and is therefore the source of ultimate cohesion); but the
deity of a non-theistic deist is not necessarily the creator, does not necessarily
intervene in the ‘running’ of the universe, and may be a wholly impersonal and
abstract god that has no specific interest in Men or specific people. Deism
therefore may mean any assumption of any ultimate, but perhaps abstract,
rationality, order, or overall organizing tendency.

Nonetheless,
honesty compels me to suggest that abstract deism has historically, and in the
lives of many individual scientists and other intellectuals, been a metastable state which sooner-or-later
falls one way or the other: either into atheism or theism (belief in a God or
gods). And in that case, I am suggesting that, in the end, an adequate
metaphysics of biology must be compatible-with (if not contiguous with) theistic
religion. However, this move into theism is not a formal philosophical
necessity, but rather a matter of probabilistic human psychology.

At any rate, it may be useful, at this point, further
to clarify why a teleology for
biology entails deism. The reason is that teleology (purpose) in biology is
based on, requires that, reality be coherent, cooperative and
complementary because reality as-a-whole must have purpose. This, in turn,
requires that there is a single and unifying organizing entity to enforce coherence, cooperation and complementarity.
So, for life, for reality, to have purpose, it must hang-together - and for
reality to hang-together requires some unifying conception of deity.

Deism is the assumption that the universe has just
such an organizing principle or entity - which may be a personal supreme
creator god among other lower gods, or one God – which is theism; or the
organizing principle may be something impersonal - a 'god of the philosophers':
in other words an hypothesis which is inferred and assumed (rather than
believed as a matter of faith). An example would be the ‘Platonic’ hypothesis
that there is a coherent primary reality outside of time where dwell objective
and eternal values and archetypal forms – in comparison to which the earthly reality
we observe is only a derived, time-bound, approximate, partial, and more-or-less
corrupt version.

Biology needs a teleology, and indeed the more
specific is that teleology, the more can be inferred from it. However, if
biology is to be a coherent and general science, then its teleology cannot be
more specific than what can be agreed-on by deism. Therefore, scientists can,
and indeed must, minimally agree on a general concept of deity. But beyond that
agreement, there will very probably be disagreement concerning the attributes, nature
and specific purposes of deity. In sum, the teleology of biology as-a-whole
seems to be based on a general and hypothetical deity, but not on any specific
God.

Therefore, deism supplies teleology, but only to
a limited degree. So we need to distinguish between the implications of the
fact of teleology and the specific direction of teleology. The fact of
teleology includes the consequences of there being an ultimate unity and an
expectation of a primary and significant degree of coherence, cooperativeness
and complementarity. I think the acknowledgment of teleology may also provide
the basis for a coherent definition of the essential nature of biology as a
subject – which I will discuss below. But what exactly is the specific aimed-at
destination of teleology may be a subject of disagreement and theorizing; e.g. there
will probably be different ideas of what the direction and purpose of
'everything' as a whole, and at lower levels. And there will also surely be scientific disagreement over the
specific mechanisms by which teleology is implemented at the various levels and
instances of biological organization.

There remains much that requires debate and
investigation, plenty for biologists to do; but all biologists ought to, and need to, be able to agree that there is an ultimate teleology, hence
coherence, to biology.

The
nature and essence of biology as a subject: Development

When biology is
defined in terms of teleology it gives an indication of how the subject may
fruitfully be defined in terms of its focus; because teleology concerns
direction. Teleology, as described above, entails the emergence and coordination
of multiple elements over time in pursuit of purpose. In simple terms,
therefore, the essence of biology as a subject has to do with development; that is with growth and
form, with differentiation and cooperation.

In sum, the core
of biology is ‘life as history’ – meaning here the unfolding through time, including functional interactions - of
entities such as cells, organisms, groups and ecosystems. I would argue that
this understanding of biology has priority over reproduction in general and
gene replication specifically – which have been made the focus of biology for
the past seventy-odd years.

Such a
re-definition of biology around the theme of development would also serve to reconnect
the subject with its deepest intellectual roots in natural history; to rebuild
the subject around a core that is distinct
from chemistry and physics on one hand, and medical research on the other; with
organisms being of interest primarily in terms of their structure, function and
interactions over their lifespan. This would surely be preferable to modern
biology which has become so narrowly focused that it sometimes seems as if the
only scientifically-interesting things that organisms do is replicate or die!

(I will suggest a
further reason why biology might beneficially be defined in terms of
development below when I discuss the causal relationship between phylogeny (evolutionary
history) and ontogeny (development.)

The history of definitions
of biology can be described as beginning with the subject conceptualized as ‘the
study of living things’; then
changing from about 1944 to ‘the study of reproducing
things’; and I now propose that in future biology should become ‘the study of developing things’.

Statement
of the new teleological metaphysics: The hierarchy of organizing entities

The chronological
sequence of the new metaphysics is the reverse of the usual posited in biology.
Current biology usually assumes that matter precedes life; life precedes the
brain; the brain precedes cognition – in other words that a solid brain comes
before cognition (thinking) - including purposiveness - emerged.

By contrast, I
suggest that consciousness and purpose are the starting point – and that
consciousness, with its ultimate teleology, therefore operates upon matter with
the proximate goal of sustaining and developing itself via instantiations in matter - instantiation here meaning the
specific and actual realization of an abstraction: building of abstraction into
solid form. Therefore, (baldly-stated) consciousness ‘organized’ brains.

(The above
conceptualization owes much to the work of Owen Barfield, who was himself
expressing ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who was in turn JW von Goethe’s scientific
editor for the standard collected works – so this theory has its ultimate roots
in Goethe’s biology; see for example Barfield, 1982; Naydler, 1996).

So that (to put
things simply); initially consciousness sufficed to organize undifferentiated
matter into ‘physics’, ‘physics’ into ‘chemistry’, and ‘chemistry’ into what we
recognize as the emergence of biological entities in their most basic forms. And
the directing consciousness which drove biological evolution was further subdivided
and specialized; for example regulating the basic transitions and divisions of
life, and beyond them the further groupings down to species, then particular
human groups.

This system of
consciousnesses can be imagined as an hierarchy of organizing entities – an hierarchy with its apex in deity. These
organizing entities operate to shape and frame the structure of reality,
including biological reality – these entities all being, ultimately,
coordinated and unified by the deity. These organizing entities are inferred to
have various properties including the ability cognitively to model future
possibilities (i.e. to have foresight, to make conjectural predictions) and
choose between possibilities on the basis of innate purpose. In essence, organizing
entities can understand (to some limited but significant extent) the current
situation, and look-ahead towards probable outcomes – and then organize biology
to reach the preferred possible outcome.

These organizing entities
are assumed to have the same kind of role as the human mind does in relation to
the human body; or as a good, wise and competent human leader has in relation
to the society he rules. That is, the ability to infer that if X continues then
Y will probably result – which means the decline or demise of the cell/
organism/ group/ society; but that if instead we do A we should arrive at B –
which offers a much better prospect of survival and continued or enhanced reproduction
(and, importantly, progress towards ultimate teleology) than does Y; and then the
organizing entity has significant (but not absolute) power to impose A upon the
system.

What then,
actually, are these organizing entities – how can we imagine them? I suggest
that different people may picture them in different ways which suit the
workings of their own minds. Some may understand them in a mathematical or
computational way; some see them as akin to ‘laws of nature’; some may
understand them to be fields of force – like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields
(Sheldrake, 1981 & 1988) but with a primary role in imposing purpose rather
than form; some may understand them as immaterial but personalized entities –
rather like the medieval astrological model of angels who inhabited (or rather
actually were) the planets and stars – but in a realm beyond and with different
properties from worldly (‘sublunar’) place, and outside of Time, and who
influenced from this realm all manner of events on earth and inside Time
(Lewis, 1966).

I personally have
a very literal, simple mind; and cannot for long refrain from anthropomorphic
representations of any cognitive and purposive entity – in other words, I
imagine these organizing entities as both personalized and material entities, localized
in space and time - although imperceptible and undetectable (at least, by
normal sensory observation). This is of course a child-like way of thinking about
causality (although not really child-ish) – but perhaps not so uncommon as may
superficially appear. After all, neuroscientists are always accusing each other
of treating the brain as if it was inhabited by a ‘homunculus’ (little man)
which is meant to be an error both irrational and shameful – and indeed the
accusers are usually correct in this accusation; because avoiding this ‘anthropomorphism’
while yet retaining a firm and imaginative grasp of science, is all-but
impossible.

Famously, Einstein
reasoned about relativity by imagining a man (a homunculus perhaps!) riding in
a tramcar away from the medieval clock in the Swiss city of Berne at speeds
approaching the speed of light (Hoffman, 1972). If Einstein apparently needed
(or, at least wanted) to do the most advanced and abstract theoretical physics
by anthropomorphic metaphors, then maybe biologists should not be ashamed to
follow his example?

The proximate
implementation of teleology

In summary -
starting from some large scale purposive, conscious and unified deity (perhaps
envisaged as the sun, or the earth/ Gaia; Lovelock, 1989) - organizing entities
direct and shape the first and most basic forms of life, prokaryotic then
eukaryotic cells, followed by the major divisions or classifications of living
things down to (real) species, sexual reproduction, individual organisms and
social groups. (The evolution of Man may, or may not, be assumed to require a
further level of organizing entity – or else the direct intervention of the
deity.)

Organizing
entities are located functionally-external to the biological entities that they
govern – they are not a part of biology. Organizing entities are an external
focus for biological entities – thus can be imagined as a point of reference:
both monitoring and shaping biology. The main role of an organizing entity is
to impose goals, direction, purpose – in a word: teleology. This entails
imposition of form, cohesion, cooperation – and identity. Identity is the
process by which the group is defined – the choice of inclusion and exclusion,
the drawing of a boundary.

It is the organizing
entity that make a group a real group in the true sense of the word ‘group’–
and not merely an arbitrary, temporary or expedient line drawn around a
collection of autonomous entities: it is the organizing entity which makes the
group a unit. Biological unity therefore derives from teleological unity.

A group of many
entities (such as a collection of components in a cell, of cells in an organism,
or organisms in a society) is itself a real and objective unified entity only when it has been organized by a single
purposive, conscious entity.

If this is accepted, and some kind of general
mechanism for teleology is assumed - such as the hierarchy of organizing
entities - then the question arises as to how teleology is imposed? There seem
to be two possibilities - purpose could be continuously imposed from outside a biological entity by the continuous
or intermittent operation of some kind of field, force or form; or else purpose
could be built-in.

While I think it likely that external forms/
fields/ forms have a role, especially in terms of organizing the simpler and
more basic (physics and chemistry) levels of evolution (Sheldrake 1981 &
1988); something additional, more detailed and generative of autonomy seems to be required for
biological entities. Biological purpose seems most likely to be built-in;
specifically that, as an entity is formed and develops, its purposive nature is
built-into the structure and organization (by the action of its organizing
entity) such that there is a degree of agency and self-regulation which is also
coordinated with the overall teleology (probably by means of in-built
complementarity of function).

For example, in multicellular organisms there
may be the mechanisms of cell-suicide or apoptosis - such that if a cell
experiences a mutation that may endanger the organism - perhaps by a neoplasm
such as cancer - then the cell destroys itself (for the good of the whole
organism). There is, in general, considerable altruism built-in at the cellular
level of a multicellular organism such that the existence of multicellular
organisms is essentially an exercise in mutual altruism. Some types of motile
white blood cells such as macrophages (which resemble free living amoebae) will
kill themselves in the process of defending the organism against microorganism
invasion (these dead warriors are found in pus): and this purpose is apparently
built-into them in terms of their core functionality.

The primary reliance upon built-in teleology
also makes it easy to understand the existence, indeed often at high rates, of
the opposite - of behaviours which are non-functional, free-riding, and
parasitic. This is explicable in the sense that teleology - including traits
that are long-termist, altruistic, cooperative and coordinated – is built-into
the organism during normal development, but is nonetheless vulnerable to
disruption by abnormal development and subsequent, later events that disrupt or
destroy these built-in mechanisms. For example, genetic damage or mutations
during the lifespan of the entity: mutant mitochondria in a eukaryotic cell,
cancer in a multicellular organism, the effects of mental illness in human
society.

Therefore, I think it most likely that organizing
entities work to impose teleology during development at the point where
entities are being formed - either originally and/ or when being reproduced.
The teleological behaviours are part of the design specification built into the
entity. Short-term selfishness can, and does, arise in or after development –
and then it is typically dealt with by built-in regulatory mechanisms found in
those ‘normal’ entities who have experienced undisrupted development and
avoided subsequent damage.

The
coherence of everything

It is the
hierarchy of organizing entities which ensures that overall and in the long
run, all directions of all sub-entities are coordinated and integrated. This
can be imagined on the lines of a military hierarchy of orders coming down from
a General (i.e. deity) through the branching ranks of Colonels, Majors,
Captains, Lieutenants, and Sergeants to the foot soldiers (i.e. the layers of
organizing entities).

Vertical, multi-level coordination therefore comes
from the teleology branching-out from a single locus. And horizontal coordination within-hierarchical-levels comes from the
mutual reciprocity and complementarity of functions – imposed on groups of
biological entities by organizing entities.

This is the
organizing principle which enables groups under direction from organizing entities
to be recognized and understood (to some significant extent); it is what
roughly corresponds to intuitions that there is an underlying order to the
world: notions such as ‘the balance of nature’, ‘the circle of life’, the
principle of ‘compensation’, or the earth conceptualized in terms of a goddess
or organism termed Gaia (Lovelock, 1981).

Thus the universe
of reality broadly hangs-together, as we observe it does; and does not utterly collapse
into a chaos of ever-smaller and faster-replicating, more mutually-exploiting purposeless
entities, as we observe it does not. There is a background tendency to
homoeostasis and elaborated specialization and coordination – and there is,
both overall and at each level and each individual unit of organization –
organizing purpose and direction.

Of course, in
particular times and places, natural selection may be amplified, may become
powerful enough to overcome the cohesive and integrative influence of
conscious, purposive entities; and consciousness diminishes, and cooperation,
complexity and order begin to break down. The purpose is then not attained but
instead thwarted.

It can happen at
any level. Ultra-selfish genes (such as transposons or segregation distorters)
may potentially lead to intra-genomic conflict with loss of
informational-identity, functional corruption and cell death; rogue malignant
(or selfishly non-functional) mitochondria may kill their symbiotic host cells;
connective tissues may be naturally-selected to become sarcomas and kill the organism;
or successful psychopaths may exploit, parasitize and lead to the destruction
of their social group.

But the fact of
life persisting; and the observations relating to evolutionary history; entails
that the background reality is teleological and cooperative.

Explaining
the necessity for an intermediating hierarchy of organizing entities

A teleology of biology
can be accepted merely on the basis of deity, and without the kind of complex,
intermediate system of organizing entities which I have proposed – and leaving
aside any speculations on the more detailed way in which teleology I
implemented in practice. In other words, it can be asserted that once a
presiding deity has been invoked as our working hypothesis – then everything
significant that happens in biology can be attributed directly to that deity.

Such a view is possible
and coherent, albeit such a tactic might reasonably be characterised in terms
of vague ‘hand-waving’; so why do I take the further step of inferring the
existence of a hierarchy of organizing entities; and attributing to them the
role of implementing teleology in a much more direct, specific, and proximate
fashion?

Essentially, the reason
for introducing intermediary causes of teleology, adding to the overall deist
unity as the cause of teleology, is firstly in order to explain the phenomena
of development of the organism; which
is also termed ontogeny or
within-organism change through the life span: growth, change of form, selective
cell death, differentiation and maturation. And also secondly to explain phylogeny; that is between-generation,
within-lineage evolutionary change: the history of extinctions, and of new and
changing species.

In different words, the
hierarchy of organizing entities is intended to account for the dynamic aspects of biology: to explain
why biology is full of change; creating, adapting and failing.

Ontogeny and phylogeny (as
types of ‘changing’), happening through time, imply that deity either cannot or
will-not achieve biological form directly and finally; but either must or
chooses to attain form by incremental steps from an initially very simple
situations – one stage building-upon the preceding. To me, this suggests that
deity works by means of intermediary causes.

Furthermore, biology
itself seems to have a hierarchical and multi-branching organization – both
ontogeny and phylogeny display this – that is evident both within organisms and
other coherent entities in the form of development, and also across the range
of biological organisms and other coherent entities in terms of the systems of
biological classification. This suggests that the organization of biological
teleology also has a hierarchical and multi-branching structure analogous to
the taxonomy of living things (the ‘tree of life’).

If this is assumed, then
it seems necessary that the hierarchy of
organizing entities must pre-exist the structure of actual biological entities,
in order that it is already in-place to organize each cumulative step in
phylogeny.

If so, then the broad-brush
resemblance between ontogeny and phylogeny (Horder, 2008) which was noted more
than a century ago by Haeckel – may have its basis not in Haeckel’s formulation
of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, with the history of evolutionary change (supposedly)
being recorded in developmental sequences, nor by any modification of that
idea; but the opposite. I suggest it is a matter of phylogeny recapitulating
ontogeny, in the sense of evolutionary change being driven by developmental
processes.

That is, the organizing
entities work primarily to affect ontogeny, to build-in teleology by shaping the process of development; and
thereby, as a consequence, these same organizing entities are also setting-up
mature biological entities in evolutionary sequences and relationships. By
affecting development, the organizing entities impose teleology on evolution.

To be even more specific,
the first member of a new species (or level of biological complexity) has been
shaped by the ordering entities – including by changing its various heritable
structural features (such as genes, and non-genetic cellular structural formal
features such as cytoplasmic structures and constituents, or cell membrane
attributes). Thus ontogenetic change comes first, and then this is transmitted via heritability first to initiate, then
establish, the step-wise phylogenetic changes that mark evolutionary history.

Conclusions
and implications

In sum, the new deistic
teleological metaphysics of biology enables the subject to re-defined around
the concept of development. The scheme would not affect the perspective of
biology in terms of the study of evolution specifically by natural selection,
nor in terms of the day-to-day activities of most biological researchers. But
metaphysics is nonetheless vitally-relevant insofar as natural selection would
henceforth be assumed to operate within
purposive cognitive processes that have foresight and are able to organize,
coordinate, and either counteract or use natural selection, as means to the
overall teleology. This background would be assumed – and we would not suppose
that natural selection ‘has the last word’.

Perhaps most
importantly, the new metaphysics of biology escapes the self-refuting paradox
of natural selection; because it can explain how it is that humans could have
valid knowledge of biology itself – as the most relevant example: how humans
might have validly discovered a true theory such as natural selection. If
humans had been merely contingently evolved to optimize reproductive success,
it is not formally impossible but it is vastly
improbable that we could have valid knowledge of anything - including natural
selection; since a mechanism for discovering valid knowledge could only have
happened by undirected chance and when it also happened to optimize
reproductive success in the immediate short term of generations. However, if by
an astonishing coincidence, it happened-to-happen that humans had had
naturally-selected the ability to have valid knowledge – knowledge for instance
of the theory of natural selection; then we could not know we knew this this
for a fact, without a further astonishing coincidence of knowing that we had
happened to evolve this way!

But - if our metaphysics posits the existence
of purposively-unified, conscious, organizing entities outwith the boundaries
of biology, and to that extent independent of (controlling of) the vicissitudes
of natural selection; then valid
knowledge might be assumed to originate from that external source. In
other words, we can know about natural selection and that it is true, only because we ourselves are something more
than merely naturally selected. In sum, the suggestion is that humans have
been cognitively-organized via our
built-in teleology such that objective knowledge is possible for us.

I am, of course,
fully aware that the above purposive metaphysics of biology sounds bizarre,
supernatural and indeed just plain absurd from the perspective of modern
biology! I have, after all, been thoroughly educated-in and acclimatized-to
that world, and have worked within it for several decades, both teaching the
subject of natural selection and publishing many papers; including many which metaphysically-assumed
that natural selection was indeed the last word on things – the exact framing assumptions
that I am here and now criticizing as radically incomplete; for example my
books Charlton, 2000 and Charlton & Andras, 2003 - especially the Appendix
to 2003.

However, stepping
outside of that professional ghetto, I am also aware that this general type and
nature of metaphysical explanation that I am now proposing has a long and
continuing pedigree among mathematicians and physicists – and indeed within a
strand of theoretical biologists which includes such diverse figures as JW von
Goethe and his scientific editor Rudolf Steiner, D’Arcy Thompson, AN Whitehead,
Conrad Waddington (and other members of the prestigious, albeit heterodox,
Theoretical Biology Club of Cambridge University), and in recent years Brian
Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman and Rupert Sheldrake.

Such individuals
(to a variable degree) have recognized that – if it is to be coherent - the
subject and methods of biology must be conceptualized within a larger (and, as
I term it, metaphysical) framework or paradigm which lies outside the
discipline of biology; however the above-named biologists were primarily
concerned with integration, organization and the development of form – while my focus here is on the
need for an externally imposed purpose.
However, I would note that there is a sometimes explicit, but more often unstated
and unacknowledged, teleological assumption behind much of the work in this
idealist, mathematical-geometric and morphological tradition.

The axiomatic
assumptions of this paradigmatic purposive framework are the basis for all
scientific work. Science is always and necessarily subordinated to philosophy,
even when that philosophy is unacknowledged - or even when it is denied. Many
clever and successful - but unreflective - modern scientists believe themselves
to be superior to metaphysics, to have transcended and replaced it with ‘solid’
empirical scientific ‘proof’. All this really means is that they do not
understand, and do not want to know about, their own metaphysical assumptions –
because they want to believe that these are just-plain-true, rather than the
consequence of non-scientific but instead philosophical choices made by actual people at some particular time and
place.

But different
choices yield different consequences; and the choice of natural selection as
the bottom-line explanation of biology has had an intellectually stunting and
transcendentally crippling effect on the discipline – has indeed destroyed the
cohesion and identity of biology, and made it a self-refuting paradox.

My hope is that
this new, teleological metaphysics of biology will provide a framework
within-which biology can operate in a coherent and contextualized fashion;
rather than, as in recent decades, simply ignoring its major problems and
deluding itself with assertions that its partial and incomplete explanations -
based on the dogmatic assumption that natural selection is the one and only
true mechanism of evolution and the bottom line reality of everything - have
universal applicability and eternal validity. However, I think I have
demonstrated that this is merely an assertion, and indeed an arrogant, uninformed,
arbitrary and indeed utterly absurd assertion! Let us then acknowledge that
there are metaphysical choices that have-been and must-be made – and try to
evaluate and compare these choices.

It is necessary to
recognize and make clear that the above metaphysics of hierarchical, purposive
and conscious, organizing entities is not a 'biological' theory. But then,
neither is natural selection a biological theory. Instead, both of these are
potential metaphysical frameworks for biology. Biology cannot exist without a
metaphysical framework – and the current one may not be the best, since it has
so many, such serious, failures to its name.

In conclusion, I
suggest that biology requires wholesale reconceptualization based on a new set
of deistic and teleological metaphysical assumptions.

Acknowledgement. I thank Rupert Sheldrake for
pointing-out that my suggested hierarchy of organizing entities bears
resemblance to the scheme proposed by Alfred Russel Wallace in The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power,
Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose (1910). (Wallace was – with Darwin –
the co-discoverer of Natural Selection.) Rupert also asked me a couple of
pertinent questions concerning the original draft; in the process of addressing
which, I (by stages) ended-up significantly expanding and refocusing this
paper.